ONE never completely rids one's consciousness of one's heroes, until their descendants make you want to forget them. Elvis Presley has always been one of my heroes – and now, the book From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir, by his daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, and granddaughter, LMP's daughter Riley Keough, has enabled me to think about Elvis more clearly.
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I'm not embarrassed about the way I approached the book (with the shaky knees of a fanboy finally getting a glimpse inside the shrine of the King of Rock 'n’ Roll), but I am by my expectations that the book wasn't going to upset me.
The person who pulled the strings in composing the book was Riley, daughter of bassist Danny Keough. She's a sober soul (and movie star in her own right). After her mother's death, she self-processed all the tape recordings made to provide material for LMP's autobiography, and where there were gaps, filled them with her own memories.
Lisa Marie Presley's life was torn between problems with drugs and a deep-seated belief that no one would have wanted anything to do with her had she not been Elvis's daughter. She adored her father, catered for the emotional disaster area that always surrounded her mother, Priscilla, and joined the Church of Scientology at an early age. She met Danny Keough at that church, tricked him into conceiving two children with her, and Michael Jackson began courting her while she was still with Keough.
The mistake of her life
She describes her marriage to Jackson as the biggest mistake of her life – and is the only person in the world who could attest with authority that he did thoroughly know his steps in the horizontal disco dance between a man and a woman. She was also an eyewitness to his growing drug addiction; unfortunately, she was also the one person who could testify about the lies and blackmail he was subjected to. From Here to the Great Unknown has brought me several new and uncomfortable insights.
Apart from the veil being lifted over Jackson's life, other conjectures about the Presley brood are now becoming fact. Most importantly, Priscilla Presley's first boyfriend after divorcing Elvis, actor Michael Edwards, not only acted inappropriately towards Lisa Marie, but sexually molested her.
In From Here to the Great Unknown, Lisa Marie and Riley Keough alternate in telling the bigger story. Lisa Marie tends to make everything about herself, but her daughter has a clearer mind and often brings a perspective in which Lisa Marie could have taken much more credit for the way she, with Danny Keough's help, had raised Riley and her brother, Ben, and kept their feet on the ground.
Fortunately, Riley is not blind either to some of the absurdities of her mother's life. She is very candid about Lisa Marie's drug problems and weaknesses – she became addicted to opioids after the birth of her children, and those same pills led to her death. When Ben shoots himself at the age of 27, Lisa Marie keeps his body in a chilled room on dry ice for two months for a proper goodbye. She becomes so obsessed with his corpse that she has a tattoo artist examine Ben's fingers and the tatts on them and then lets him tattoo Ben's name in the exact same place and in the same font on her own fingers.
A treasure trove of gossip
If you want gossip, From Here to the Great Unknown is a treasure trove. Early on, Lisa Marie Presley describes Elvis's background such: “Until 1953, the Presley family had lived in humble circumstances. Graceland was the physical manifestation of the most incredible American dream come to life. Elvis had been a small-town boy in a small-town family mired in poverty, but he’d made it beyond big, miraculously becoming a godlike figure, the biggest star on the planet. Yet he remained a Southern boy who simply got to buy his beloved Mama a big old house.”
But Mama drank herself to death, mapping out the genetic vulnerability of the offspring.
She goes on to show how unprepared Elvis was for his fame, how unequipped he was to see through others' lies and sinister plans, and how this becomes the pattern that repeats in the lives of Priscilla and Lisa Marie. The only real difference is that Lisa Marie is blessed with the maternal instincts of a lioness, and according to Riley, it's those instincts, plus the support of her father, that secured her own escape from others' machinations.
Should one see Elvis, Priscilla and Lisa Marie as victims? Of what, you might ask, the American Dream? Human needs are ultimately not to be channelled in just one direction. Lisa Marie's summary that her father only ever wanted to take care of his mother is very telling. Lisa Marie herself was a spoilt brat until her death, used to getting her way with everything from financial investments (at which she excelled) to her prescribed medications. Financial abundance and spiritual poverty.
When you finally put the book down, you mutter: “These poor, poor people ..."
From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir by Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough was published by Random House USA and costs R900 at Exclusive Books.
♦ VWB ♦
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